


Remainders, Reminders

by blithers



Category: Alice (2009)
Genre: Blood, F/M, Podfic Available, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-24
Updated: 2011-09-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I took tea with you, when you were older.  I remember you, Hatter."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remainders, Reminders

**Author's Note:**

> A big thank you to my wonderful beta [theburningdoll](http://theburningdoll.livejournal.com/). Inspiration for the image of Alice Hamilton dressed as Lewis Carroll's Alice comes from the story [The Firebreather is Beneath the Clover](http://archiveofourown.org/works/225901), which takes the idea in a much more fun direction (roleplaying!).

She's dressed, _his_ Alice, dressed as Alice-of-Legend, a sky blue dress flaring out from her hips and a starched white apron double-wrapped around her waist. She's wearing pearly, translucent stockings that cling to the shape of her legs and oddly child-like shoes, inky black with a single buckle.

"Hatter," she says softly, and drops on her hands and knees to crawl closer to him in the narrowing corridor, and his mouth goes dry. He shifts uncomfortably, folded into his side of the hallway which is no larger than an ice box. She tucks herself into the wall next to him, bent at a right angle and her dress rucked upward in disarray. He can see the solid line of white circling her thigh where her knee-highs end, the hook for the garter gleaming at her side.

"Who am I?" she asks him in a distant tone.

He shakes his head and touches the side of her face carefully. Her cheekbone feels real.

"Who am I?" the girl-woman-Alice repeats, a little sadly, and leans into his fingers like a sunflower. He touches her leg then. The nylon of her stockings is cool and slippery, and his fingers slide up the bone of her shin without friction. The tip of his finger reaches her knee and he stops, feeling suddenly unsure.

"I don't know who I am," she says, and the statement is still more like a question, more like an _invitation_.

"Come here, then," he says softly. "Come closer."

She starts to crawl toward him, one hand on each side of his legs, her skirt poofed out behind her like the sky in her wake and her shoulders dipping as she moves. One hand forward, by his thigh. One hand by his hip. She grasps the collar of his shirt and his body _yearns_ towards her, like iron shavings toward a lodestone, like tea leaves to the bottom of a china cup. She licks her lips then, her tongue swiping at her bottom lip like a cat's, and he thinks, desperately, frantically, and a little uncertainly, _she is not your Alice_.

"Who am I?" she asks a third time, her voice barely a whisper, the question vibrating on his lips and her breath brushing his skin like the wings of a moth. Her eyes are dark and large this close, black as an addict's.

"I have a question to ask you first," he whispers back, and moves in still closer to her, so that he can breathe the words in her ear. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"

She frowns slowly, puzzled. She settles back on the heels of her buckled shoes, straight brown hair falling into her face, the strands catching on her mouth. He remembers, fleetingly, that she once had blonde hair, corkscrewed into gentle waves with a black ribbon behind her ears. He shakes his head, uncertain, trying to rid himself of the double-vision.

The movement makes his head ache. He lifts his hand to the side of his head, to knuckle into the soft tissue at his temple and straighten the world out, and his fingers come away smeared in red.

"Oh," she says softly, and captures his wrist gently in her hands. She turns his fingers this way and that, examining the blood that glistens on his fingertips. He catches the flesh at the inside of his lip with his teeth, hardly daring to move, when she brings his hand to her mouth and sucks the blood off his fingers. Her mouth is oddly cool, and her tongue is quick and rough.

A window snaps open at the opposite end of the hallway and a large eyeball appears, peering down into the hallway, darting this way and that like a school of small fish.

Startled, Alice rears back, biting his finger as she pulls away, her teeth cutting into the flesh above his knuckles and trailing blood.

"My, my," he hears a disembodied voice say, as the eyeball flicks dispassionately in his direction, folded into the smaller end of the hallway. "What have we here? Two lovebirds, cozied away in their nest. Now, now, we can't have that, can we?"

The eye disappears and the window snaps shut with a faint click, as suddenly as if it never existed. Hatter shakes his head again, and feels his thoughts rattle about, jumbled up in haphazard piles against the walls of his aching skull.

Alice ignores the eye and the window, and drags a finger across her bloodied lip, coating her finger with his blood. She stares at him and, without blinking, reaches up to slowly drag her finger from her brow, down the center of her forehead to the tip of her nose, a broad streak of crimson splitting her face like war paint. She doesn't say anything, but he can still hear her question echoing in the darkness between them. Her eyes are shining so that he can't turn away, her face dripping with his blood.

 _Who am I_.

The words come to him then, falling off his tongue without thought. "You are Alice," he whispers. "Simply-Alice, more-than-Alice, practical-Alice, mad-Alice. You are Alice."

"I remember you," she says, quietly and a little tentatively.

"I think it's time to wake up," the disembodied voice drawls, and light begins to flood the hallway, a white the color of hot steel seeping through the walls.

"You," continues Alice slowly, gaining confidence, her face washed out in the brilliant light but eyes dark as the bottom of the lake and trained steadily on his face, "I remember you. I took tea with you, when you were older. I remember you, Hatter." Her voice grows warmer then, shot through with fragile, thin-skinned bubbles of joy. "Quick-tongued-Hatter, irascible-Hatter. My Hatter."

She leans in to him and her lips touch his. It's painfully chaste. He wants to grab the back of her skull, wrap her long brown hair around his fingers, and drag his tongue across the slick ridges of her teeth. He doesn't.

He feels the words more than hears them, formed against his lips.

"My Hatter. _Mad_ Hatter."

He stops breathing. The light is a shell of blank white around them, erasing the details of the small world they were in and leaving only emptiness. They are the only two people in the world.

"Say it again," he manages finally, his voice rough.

"Mad Hatter."

He kisses her then, kisses her proper, and she kisses him back hard for one brilliant moment, her tongue in his mouth. It's open-mouthed and dirty in the way that he thinks people from Alice's world kiss, forceful in their eagerness, lives lit up like a sparkler and burning out too fast. He laces his hands through the snow-white cotton apron strings at her waist. Her hair, long and dark, falls over both of them like a curtain. He kisses her with all of himself, with intensity, with _purpose_ , with years of longing and empty tea parties and riddles that will always slip through his fingers.

And then it ends.

The light shatters through the walls and the world breaks, splintering into jagged pieces of white. She is torn apart from him in an instant, falling away; he tries to cry out, but the words jumble up in his throat and stick there like old bread. Her skirt a circle of sky blue, round as a parachute, but she's growing smaller as if shrunk by a potion instead of distance.

He watches, desperate, until she's nothing more than a pinprick and a moment after that, like the sun sinking beneath the horizon, she's gone and he's alone again.

Alone.

No, not alone.

He is strapped to a chair, breathing heavily. He shakes his head again, trying to clear the cobwebs because surely _this_ is the dream, and the movement stabs an icepick of pain behind his eyes, dimming his vision. His body is heavy with resumed gravity and his aching bones are stitched together with little threads of pain through his skin. His hands are tied somewhere behind his back.

Where Alice kissed him there is blood in his mouth. He spits, and his tongue hits a tooth which shifts gently in its root. He tries not to think about it.

"Good morning," the voice says, and he makes out two figures in front of him, watching him curiously. The figure on the right cracks his knuckles and the one on the left cocks his head. "Let's see now. Where were we?"

He concentrates on the muscles in his face and forces a smile. He thinks there might be more snarl than smile there.

"Remind me," he rasps, trying for scorn in his voice, and light tinged with red blossoms under his eyelids.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Remainders, Reminders](https://archiveofourown.org/works/733056) by [Readbyanalise010](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Readbyanalise010/pseuds/Readbyanalise010)




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